EVENTS

Why I am an atheist – Ravel

I never got the man in the sky. I was brought up in an ultra Reform Jewish home, with holidays celebrated at home in English, and no formal religious training after I was about 8. I read the stories, but my connection to Judaism was cultural (food, some major holidays, know you’re Jewish in case there’s another Hitler, etc.), rather than religious. I learned about science and mythology when I was quite young, and couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about. I was interested in science and math; my earliest books were about science, and my favorite “toy” was a chemistry set. I thought myths were kind of interesting and amusing stories, but not something to be believed. Sometime in junior high school (grades 7-9 when I was there), I came across the aphorism “Man created God in his own image.” That made sense to me. I never gave it any more thought.

I used to enjoy myths and fairy tales, but everyone knew they were fanciful. So, they weren’t taken seriously.

Not so with the Bible. Everyone claimed to believe that was true and a great many powerful people still believe that garbage and want to foist it onto the populace through a bastardized educational system. We are in a desperate battle right now with the coming election.

Back in the 1960s, my mother told me a story with the moral: “Man created God in his own image.” It was about a puppy who wanted to know what God looked like. His mother told him that God was a great dog in the sky, but the puppy wasn’t sure of this, so he, or was it she, went and asked a horse that lived nearby. The horse explained that God was a great big, powerful horse who lived in the sky. The puppy then asked a good number of other animals what God looked like, and in each case got a very similar answer. God was basically the same as which ever animal he or she asked, except greater, more wonderful and living in heaven. Then came the moral, and presumably an atheist or at least agnostic puppy.

I have no idea of the origin of the story, but I’m betting it was from a book, probably from the 1920s. The moral is much older, sometimes attributed to Feuerbach in the 1840s and definitely extant in the 1870s. At least that’s what Google Books seems to think.